EDITORIAL: Fraud should cut off hand that feeds

LOUIS PIERARD
What is to be done to stop the parasites who rip off their fellow New Zealanders with welfare fraud?
The most obvious point is that they do it because they can. Something is seriously wrong with delivery and administration of benefits if the 10 largest debts owed by DPB, unemployment, sickness and invalid's beneficiaries can reach more than $5.6 million. Some of that debt is accidental overpayment, certainly, but for most it is fraud.
Critics of benefit-fraud waste, who urge a tightening of the rules, stand accused of beneficiary bashing. All genuine beneficiaries - and their advocates - should be determined to weed out those nasty sponges whose plundering of the welfare system gives it and all whom it is designed to assist a bad name. However, it is also of little use pointing to the success of investigation and arrest. Social Development and Employment Minister, David Benson-Pope says he is committed to recovering any and all debt it is owed. Most of those beneficiaries haven't a hope of paying back the money and drip feeding will take decades.
New Zealand First MP Heather Roy points out that the 10 largest debts taxpayers are owed by people on the DPB totals $1.5 million. The largest single debt is $200,934.31, which is being repaid at between $19 and $76 a week.
At best, she says, that debt will be repaid in 50 years, though taxpayers may have to wait as long as two centuries. The largest sickness-benefit debt, $201,376.56, is being repaid at between $10 and $32 a week. That represents from 121 years to 387 years of debt.
There has to be a greater level of accountability. However great the willingness to fund welfare with one's taxes, the laxness that allows that generosity to be exploited soon becomes intolerable.
Any reluctance to stop and to prosecute the thieves sends the message that because of their reduced circumstances benefit fraudsters are entitled to a different set of standards (no doubt many of them would cheerfully agree as they set about redistributing wealth to themselves).
There has to be a limit to the kindness of the state. Convicted benefit fraudsters who still have a debt outstanding no longer deserve to be beneficiaries. And they should not be.
If benefits were properly regulated to make them fraud-proof, and if intending cheats knew that if they were convicted of fraud they could no longer claim a benefit while any sum was outstanding, welfare theft would clear up overnight and credibility be restored to the system.